Archive for the ‘Language and poitics’ Category

A few days ago, this full-page magazine display made the rounds of Facebook:

(#1) Deriding the “Libtard Agenda” while imitating the Johnson Smith Co.’s ads for novelty items in the back pages of comic books and other publications aimed at children

The first copies I saw didn’t identify the creator or the publication the page came from, and there was some question whether it was (as George V. Reilly, invoking Poe’s Law, put it) “a right-wing parody of progressive views, or a left-wing parody of right-wing opinions of progressive views”. Parody, certainly, but from what viewpoint?

So in its form it’s a parody of a genre of advertising hucksterism. And then in its specific content it’s a parody of a style of political talk (either mocking what’s framed as a preoccuption with kale, gun control, facts, and the like, or mocking those who engage in such mockery).

Much has now become clear. To start with, the copy of the page in #1 identifies the creator as Mary Trainor, and that provides enough context to eventually sort things out.

(Talk about mansex in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest — or, for that matter, Facebook the Prudish.)

From the TitanMen gay porn studio, for Mothers Day this year:

(#1) Cropped ad; the full ad can be viewed on AZBlogX, in the 5/12 posting “Mothers / Muthuhs Day 2018”

That’s Dirk Caber and Daymin Voss in New Rules: two hot muthas, and muthas — a variant of the vulgar slang mothers, a clipping of the vulgar slang motherfuckers, an epithet that can be either deprecatory or (as here) celebratory — is the link to Mothers Day.

So we end up with gay porn for Mothers Day — a holiday I’m now tickled to think of, alternatively, as Motherfuckers Day. Or, possibly, Samuel L. Jackson Day, for the great cinematic motherfucker-wielder.

As a bonus, half the men in the cast of New Rules are not only mothers / muthuhs, but also daddies, in one of the gay senses of daddy: ‘attractive older gay man’. In fact, they’re muscle daddies.

Three cartoons in my recent feeds: a One Big Happy with a Southernism that Ruthie’s unfamiliar with; a Rhymes With Orange with tuxidermy ( = tuxedo + taxidermy); and a Zippy with a war of plush cudgels (and the munitions industry that it supports). Nothing to do with the 1906 SF earthquake.

Two cartoons, one (a Galley Slave cartoon by Christopher Weyant in the New Yorker of 5/14/01), explicitly about four-part harmony; and one (today’s Zippy) alluding to the Ink Spots and so to their silky four-part harmonies:

Discussions on many Facebook pages about the use of the term neo-Nazis to refer to marchers in Charlottesville VA on August 12, with their swastikas, torch-marching, Hitler salutes, chanting anti-Jewish slogans and “Blood and Soil” (Blut und Boden) — plus specifically American touches like the Confederate battle flag, KKK hoods, and open displays of assault rifles. Some participants in these discussions maintained with some passion that they called the marchers Nazis, because that’s what they were.

I can’t of course legislate how people talk — but if you want both accuracy and punch, neo-Nazi is the way to go.

Some well-known phenomena: ceteris paribus, in conversations between men and women, (a) men speak significantly more than women, and (b) men interrupt women significantly more than vice versa. The effects carry over (not surprisingly) to argument between justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, and there they are augmented by another effect, that conservatives interrupt liberals significantly more often than vice versa. (These results from a study now in press for the Virginia Law Review.)

These effects can be seen as instances of a larger phenomenon: a tendency of those who are, or believe themselves to be, more dominant in an interaction to feel free to impose themselves on their partners and a corresponding tendency of those who are, or believe themselves to be, less dominant in an interaction to avoid imposing themselves on their partners.

The story came to me in the NYT on the 18th, in a piece by Adam Liptak. Well, in print in the national edition on the 18th, under the title “Let Me Finish, Please: Conservative Men Dominate the Debate’ — and on-line on the 17th, under the title “Why Gorsuch May Not Be So Genteel on the Bench”:

A news item that’s been in my posting queue since last October: in the October 2016 issue of The Atlantic, “Big in Denmark: The U.S. Ambassador” by Amy Weiss-Meyer, beginning:

When Rufus Gifford, the U.S. ambassador to Denmark, won a Danish television award for his reality show, he ran onto the stage, beaming. “Oh man,” he said, surprised. “Wow.” The show, Jeg Er Ambassadøren fra Amerika (or I Am the Ambassador From America), was renewed for a second season (and will come to U.S. viewers this fall via Netflix [I am watching it as I write this]). A Danish biography of Gifford was a best seller. At a music festival in June, the chart-topping Danish pop band Lukas Graham dedicated its song “Nice Guy” to him.

“Rufus Gifford is a rock star,” Nicolai Wammen, a Danish MP and a friend of Gifford’s, told me. As an appointee of President Obama’s, Gifford is likely nearing the end of his diplomatic stint, though Danes frequently ask him to stay. His biographer, Stéphanie Surrugue, remembers walking alongside Gifford at a political gathering and noticing that he was getting as much attention as the nearby prime minister. “People were shouting ‘Rufus!’ as they were shouting ‘Lars’ after the prime minister.” It was, she says, “a little bit crazy.”

The lesson for the day begins with a news story. From yesterday in the Guardian:

British Muslim teacher denied entry to US on school trip: Juhel Miah from south Wales was removed from plane in Reykjavik despite suspension of president’s travel ban … A council spokesman said Miah was left feeling belittled at what it described as “an unjustified act of discrimination”. The council said the teacher is a British citizen and does not have dual nationality.

Then from Nadim Zaidi on Facebook, commenting on this:

These stories are becoming so commonplace that I don’t even bat an eye at them anymore. And that is how it starts, through normalization. More specifically, banality, the banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt wrote.

That’s normalization, the nominalization of innovative normalize (IN) — ‘render normal [‘acceptable’] that which was previously deemed beyond acceptable bounds’ used in a political context. From Emily Dreyfus in Wired11/23/16:

Long before [[REDACTED]] became the president-elect, his detractors warned against “normalizing” his myriad violations of campaign decorum: the bigotry and misogyny, the Putin-philia and cavalier talk about nuclear weapons. Since [his] election …, “don’t normalize this” has become a liberal mantra, a reminder to stay vigilant in the face of aberrant presidential behavior that Americans may feel tempted — or emotionally bludgeoned — into excusing as just the way the country works now.